The amnesia that surrounds our earliest life is not only a great
human mystery but also a receptacle into which is poured by the
baby's relatives the beginnings of a life story. In later years
these relatives can look at the grown child and see their first
observations confirmed, for was he not always a curious baby, a
cranky baby, a calm baby, what have you? We come into the world
swaddled in the beginnings of a story, and, by the time we begin
remembering and tending it, it already has a shape and a momentum.
When I was born, in 1942, my young parents were following my
father's naval orders around the country--Bremerton, Washington;
Norman, Oklahoma. I spent many of my first months with my father's
parents in Cincinnati. There are photographs of me in, of course, a
sailor suit. The lawn at the back, or western side, of my
grandparent's house had a few huge trees--could they have been
oaks?--and I think I remember standing at the edge of that lawn, on
a kind of flagstone patio, in the late-afternoon light, staring
excitedly and contentedly at the effect the tall trees and their
long shadows made. The world seemed vast and full of comfortable
mystery, and yet I was but a few feet from the safety of the house.
But that would have, of course, been later, when I was four or
maybe even six. I stood there often. And, of course, I've seen
photographs of the lawn and house. And maybe I'm recalling some
older relative's anecdote about a boy at the edge of a lawn that
somehow, inexplicably, has got blended into my own memories, like
vodka slipped into a bowl of punch. My earliest memory seems to be
from the back yard of my mother's mother's house in Ames, Iowa.
There's a sandbox, a tiny swatch of grainy sidewalk, and--there!
it's moving--a ladybug. I have tried again and again to construct a
tiny narrative from these bright props, but they won't connect.
They lie there and gleam with promise but won't connect. \ls\ The
war ended, my sister Susan was born, my father took a job with the
Soil Conservation Service in Ohio, and then the four of us were in
a boxy farmhouse outside Rosewood, Ohio, for a year and then moved
into a house just outside the city limits of Troy, Ohio. The smells
of that house, that life, those years, I absorbed all unthinkingly,
as greedily and easily as breath. Later, thinking back fondly on
them, I at first organized them easily: indoors and outdoors,
female and male. Coffee, dishwashing liquid, baking are foremost
among the kitchen smells, and the braided scent of misty heat and
faint scorch that meant ironing. I remember, too, coming home from
school during the Army-McCarthy hearings to find my mother ironing
glumly, fascinated and appalled by what I now know to call the
self-righteousness and swagger and mendacity of the whole gloomy
circus. Once or twice--I think I remember this correctly--she was
weeping a little. A child's world is small. Think how easily I
wrote the war ended earlier. I don't remember it myself. In 1945 I
remember I suddenly had a sister. I saw in the kitchen those
puzzling afternoons how the cruelty of the official world, the
world that history records and by whose accounts I knew to write
that the war ended, could come into the house and linger, itself a
sort of odor.
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